Windows 2000 Expo (continued from page 3)
PowerQuest quite simply has some amazing utilities for managing just about anything that has to do with a hard drive. The products continue to improve and PowerQuest has extended the core offerings to include additional solutions that are important for 95/98/NT/2000 System Administrators.
I probably don’t have to say much about Partition Magic Pro and Drive Image Pro. Partition Magic is still the best utility available for creating, resizing, merging and converting disk partitions. And Drive Image Pro, along with Symantec’s Ghost, is a standard tool for creating an exact duplicate of a drive. I still give the edge in functionality to Drive Image Pro since it includes Partition Magic Pro and a variety of other tools to help you manage software distribution and the process of setting up a new computer from an existing image.
A couple of newer products from PowerQuest also caught my eye:
PowerQuest SecondChance - This program takes snapshots of your system periodically. If your system at some point becomes unstable, you will be able to return to an earlier point of time when the system was more stable. This is significantly better than NT’s broken return to last known good configuration.
PowerQuest ServerMagic - The most compelling feature of this product is the ability to expand a RAID 5 partition on NT without wiping out your current partition. This is a standard feature on most new Hardware RAID controllers, this software extends that to the OS software RAID, this is very cool.
PowerQuest DataKeeper - If you read my article about “How not to get fired”, you would have seen mention of a gentleman who was not backing up his data to a network drive. With DataKeeper you can actually automate this task on Windows 95/98 and keep a real-time backup of all or part of a person’s data in a location of your choosing. If you do not currently backup desktop computers, this is something you might want to consider for your more vocal users (CEO would be my first choice).
Those are my three picks for the best utilities of Windows 2000 Expo. Later this week I will continue this series with security products and some other interesting applications from Windows 2000 Expo.